A Flashy, Flawed 'Aviator':
Like Hughes's Spruce Goose,
Tale of Tycoon Flies, Almost

DiCaprio Can't Fill in the Blanks
In This Sanitized Biography;
'Million Dollar Baby' Is No KO

By

Joe
Morgensternn

Updated Dec. 17, 2004 12:01 a.m. ET

Martin Scorsese's "The Aviator" stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes, the fabled industrialist, Hollywood playboy, movie tycoon, airline executive, obsessive-compulsive recluse and, yes, aviator who designed the Spruce Goose, a giant flying boat that lifted off the water only once, in 1947, with Hughes at the controls. Like that eight-engine behemoth, this account of Hughes's life is spruced up (his craziness sanitized to make him sympathetic), goosed up (with flashy techniques the director favors), wooden-winged (though the thing flies, it doesn't soar), and remarkable to behold as it goes by. (The production was designed by Dante Ferretti, and photographed by Robert Richardson.) Watching the actors and gorgeous trappings is an adventure in cognitive dissonance. I didn't believe a single minute in almost three hours, but enjoyed being there all the same.

Enjoyment and disbelief coexist quite happily in the razzle-dazzle of the early reels. Mr. Scorsese has brought his love of old-fashioned Hollywood pageantry to a big, newish-fashioned saga of a thwarted visionary. (It's his version of Francis Coppola's "Tucker: The Man and His Dream.") Howard Hughes produced and directed movies, starting at the age of 22, so movie love provides the director of "The Aviator," and its writer, John Logan, with a perfect access route to Hughes's varied and storied career. But movie love in this case also means a production more concerned with theatricality than with realism or biographical truth.

When we first see Mr. DiCaprio's Howard Hughes as a baby-faced adult, the year is 1927, and he's directing his first film, the extravagant aviation epic "Hell's Angels." (Though the re-creation is terrific fun, no time is taken to suggest how the son of a Texas drill-bit tycoon learned to direct, or to note that other directors worked on the film.) Next, Howard is at the premiere, with flash bulbs exploding like grenades, pow! pow! pow!, and a bizarre Jean Harlow lookunalike at his side. Then Howard's life goes pow! pow! pow! He falls for Cate Blanchett's Katharine Hepburn! (Who wouldn't?) He teaches Kate how to fly! (Beautiful sequence.) He buys TWA! (The guy's a gambler.) He breaks the world's speed record, then walks away from a crash landing in a beet field! ("Fastest man on earth," Hughes tells Hepburn when he gets home, tapping himself boyishly -- and charmingly -- on the chest.)

This romantic interlude gives "The Aviator" a counterpart of the uplift that Hughes would later engineer, quite literally, into Jane Russell's bra. (She was his ultrabuxom star in "The Outlaw.") Ms. Blanchett's portrayal isn't just an astonishing soundalike -- she seems to have internalized all the rhythms as well as the timbre of Hepburn's voice -- but an enchanting creation in its own right. Mr. DiCaprio's initial jauntiness is entertaining too. His Howard comes on as a Gatsby with the gift of blunt gab and the passion of an Icarus for risky flight.

Yet a paradox shadows both performances. Cate Blanchett does what's asked of her wonderfully well, but it's still a trick, just like Jude Law's fleeting turn as Errol Flynn, or Kate Beckinsale's game impersonation of Ava Gardner. (Game but pallid, beneath Ava's sensational clothes.) Leonardo DiCaprio brings an impressive set of skills to his role, but they're the wrong skills, because he's wrong for the part. While he comes to look like the real-life Hughes as his character ages, he remains unconvincing as a man tortured by brain disease. It's as if the brilliant imposter Mr. DiCaprio played in "Catch Me if You Can" had somehow snagged this part and was going through the motions cleverly, even though the full range of the hero's emotions was beyond him.

And beyond, or apart from, the movie's intentions. "The Aviator" bites off only a slice of Hughes's story, choosing to avoid his unsavory sex life and crackpot politics, and ending before his move to Las Vegas, where he descended into the depths of solitary madness. That's fair enough: As Hepburn says here, "Movies are movies, Howard, not life." Martin Scorsese's movie gives us plenty to munch on: elegant airplanes; a shattering crash; zestful music; Alec Baldwin's smooth take on Pan American's Juan Trippe; Alan Alda's unctuous, unprincipled Owen Brewster, the senator who went after Hughes on Trippe's behalf when TWA tried to break Pan Am's stranglehold on international routes.

Still, movies try to simulate life, or heighten it, and this one succeeds only partly. Its hero may be a visionary, but he also displays alarming behaviors, and no one really talks about them; they're just for display. His career in aviation lacks context: World War II comes and goes with hardly a mention. His insanity lacks scale: the spectacle is intriguing, rather than commanding. In the Pixar extravaganza, "The Incredibles," the tiny costume designer Edna Mode, a takeoff on Hollywood's legendary Edith Head, laments: "I used to design for gods!" In "The Aviator," the stars playing gods -- and monsters -- seem all too mortal.

'Million Dollar Baby'

Clint Eastwood directed "Million Dollar Baby." It's a boxing film in which he plays a world-weary trainer, Frankie Dunn, who reluctantly takes on a female fighter played by Hilary Swank. She's very strong in her role, dramatically and physically, while his performance reminded me of something Art Carney said a long time ago about his stirring work in "The Late Show." All he tried to do in the role, Carney told me, was be "correct." An old-fashioned notion, and a fine one, it epitomizes Mr. Eastwood's work here -- nothing showy, nothing disproportionate. You can't even call his acting minimalist, since that would suggest artfulness. It's sufficientist -- just enough to give us privileged glimpses of Frankie's good, guilt-ridden soul.

"Million Dollar Baby" is a mood piece punctuated by powerful action, with a plot turn I won't discuss, except to say that only a star of Clint Eastwood's stature could have gotten a major studio to go along with the story's resolution, which is nothing if not forthright. For a while the dominant mood is muted melancholy. Though the world has passed Frankie by, he's found refuge in a neighborhood gym, which he owns, and a cherished friend in Morgan Freeman's Scrap, an ex-boxer who's no stranger to the source of Frankie's guilt. Then Ms. Swank's Maggie Fitzgerald comes in off the street to change everyone's life -- an earnest, desperate refugee from Ozark poverty who thinks she can succeed in the professional ring, even though she's no longer young, provided someone is willing to teach her, and believe in her.

The movie, which was adapted by Paul Haggis from the "Rope Burns" stories of F.X. Toole, is also a love story -- Maggie takes the place of Frankie's estranged daughter. If some of this sounds predictable or pat, it's because "Million Dollar Baby" constitutes, in form if not always in substance, a thoroughly conventional drama. It isn't the epic event being hailed by admirers who insist, as they did last year with "Mystic River," on elevating Mr. Eastwood's directorial style from conventional to classical. I say this because his new movie, for which he wrote the graceful score, should be appreciated for what it is, not overpraised and then seen as a disappointment. It is thoughtful, unfashionable, measured, mostly honest, sometimes clumsy or remote, often exciting, occasionally moving and eventually surprising. It's correct.

'The Sea Inside'

God bless great actors, and great acting. Javier Bard&eacute;m shows how it's done in "The Sea Inside," a Spanish-language feature, directed by Alejandro Amen&aacute;bar, about Ram&oacute;n Sampedro, a quadriplegic who was the first person in Spain to request that his life be ended by euthanasia. (His wish was granted after a 30-year campaign.) One could argue that Mr. Bard&eacute;m showed us everything about acting we could have wanted to know when he played the Cuban poet and novelist Reynaldo Arenas in "Before Night Falls." But "The Sea Inside" is different, since this time he can only act from the neck up. And so he does, to the point of updating half of an old theatrical joke that had John Gielgud as the world's best actor from the neck up, and Laurence Olivier from the neck down.

That's not to make light of the hero's plight, though one of the movie's many strengths is his self-ironic humor. Paralyzed as the result of a diving accident, Ram&oacute;n can move only his head, and move those around him with his voice. Mr. Bard&eacute;m's handsome face, changed substantially but not essentially by excellent older-age makeup, is partly buried in his neck, while his normally rich, robust voice is reduced to a soft but urgent flow of language that can be lilting, rueful, lyrical or ferocious. And those around him are both moved and moving: an ardent village woman played superbly by Lola Due&ntilde;as, a disabled-rights lawyer, with her own rather contrived disability, played by Bel&eacute;n Rueda (whose beauty mustn't be held against her; she gives a marvelous performance in what is, remarkably, her feature-film debut.) "The Sea Inside" has its share of contrivances, some more successful than others, but center stage is occupied by truth, and austere beauty.

'Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events'

One problem with "Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events" stems from an unfortunate phenomenon that kids understand very well. Grownups have a habit of going on too long. Jim Carrey is the prime offender here. He's such an unseemly showoff that the movie keeps stopping in its tracks. But how, and why, should kids be expected to understand that their beloved Daniel Handler books have been damaged by gratuitous darkness, a damage that can't be undone by design? Rich Heinrichs's production design is endlessly inventive, a retro vision of Jules Verne via Terry Gilliam, but who was this glum movie made for? Surely not young children in search of cheerful fun.

'Spanglish'

In "Spanglish," a social comedy by James L. Brooks, a good story about culture clash and the immigrant experience lies buried beneath layers of Bel-Air blather and bilious bombast. Paz Vega is Flor, a beautiful Mexican mother, innocent of English, who, with her beautiful, gifted daughter, enters California illegally and finds work keeping house for a wealthy family. Adam Sandler plays the master of the house, John Clasky, a preposterously saintly wimp. T&eacute;a Leoni is Deborah Clasky, his fiendishly narcissistic wife. I've enjoyed Ms. Leoni's comic gifts in the past, and I'll enjoy them again, but "Spanglish" asks her to play crazed, and she delivers with a performance of unremitting, crazymaking shrillness. In the tooth of Deborah's mouth storms, all subtlety is blown away.

* * *

DVD TIP: It is time, once again, to sing the praises of "Melvin and Howard" (1980), which I've recommended before, but not when Howard Hughes was the subject of a major movie. Jonathan Demme's delicate fantasy is a minor movie, but, deservedly, a small classic. Paul Le Mat is Melvin Dummar, a small-town goofball who comes upon Jason Robards's Howard Hughes, a scruffy vagrant, or so it would seem, lying helpless in the desert. Once you've seen this poetic Howard, all others are prosaic.

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